


Paris Morning

by houndsoflove



Category: The Who
Genre: M/M, Unrequited Love, Unresolved Sexual Tension, yep
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-06-06
Updated: 2015-06-06
Packaged: 2018-04-03 05:17:50
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,646
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4088359
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/houndsoflove/pseuds/houndsoflove
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Kit, Keith and Pete in the City of Lights.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Paris Morning

**Author's Note:**

> OK, so this is an idea that wouldn't leave me alone. I was reading Keith's biography 'Dear Boy', where in an anecdote someone expresses the opinion that Keith was Kit's favourite because he found him physically attractive. It goes on to say that although there's no evidence to suggest that he actually did fancy him, it's entirely possible.  
> Either way, Kit and Keith liked each other a great deal, lol. I'm a bit of a Kit fangirl because I find him so interesting, and I wanted to write something from his perspective because I've not seen another fic that does (if there is, point me in its direction!). First person is horrible to write so I hope it reads OK.  
> This fic is set vaguely in the mid to late sixties. Although the band actually went to France together, I was inspired by an interview where Pete related a conversation he had with one of Kit's boys who he took on a sort of romantic trip to Paris. Anyway I've waffled on long enough now! I hope you like it.

It was on a whim that I took Pete and Keith to Paris. Not for business, but for pleasure - I wanted to show my boys the dappled green light of avenues, and sit with them under café awnings, and in their company soak up new music inside the velvet gloom of cellar clubs. I'd grown so fond of them - and in so short a time - that it seemed only right that I treat them to a little foreign culture.

Pete picked up the language quickly, murmuring it in a wonderfully scattershot, muddled way, but somehow always managing to make himself understood. Keith, on the other hand, who was forever mimicking the little phrases I dropped into my speech (sav-wah fair, kell soo-preez, eyebrows leaping up as he formed them 'round his London drawl), proved hopeless. 

I had rented a small flat the year before, with a balcony sagging under flowers and a fleeting glimpse of the Eiffel tower. There were two bedrooms, large and bright, and I planned to have Keith sleep in one and Pete in the other. Keith would have my usual room and I would have the couch (relieved of its dust sheet after a long winter of emptiness), secure in the knowledge that, not more than ten steps away, the object of my affection slept peacefully on.

You see, I had an ulterior motive.

Three days into our holiday we clattered merrily up the stairs of the building as midnight rolled around. It was a steaming summer night - we'd spent it drinking, smoking, dancing, and were now soaked with sweat and ready to imbibe the champagne we had only just bought, chilled with a rapidly melting block of ice chipped into pieces with a bent fork.

Somewhat predictably, Pete wanted to talk about the band. I was only half-listening to his barrage of ideas and criticisms because Keith's antics were proving much more interesting. He and I were on the black beauties, a nice little pocketful I'd earned from an American friend of mine. Keith had been trying to woo a diminutive snub-nosed mouse from Montmartre all night, but without success. "No girls," I'd warned him at last, hot with jealousy and unable to give him a reason why. So he'd returned empty-handed, tense with lust, coiled tight as a spring. His mood rubbed off on me. I knew, tonight, that I had to have him.

Pete soon gave up on the business talk and instead sat in unusual sullen silence, refined and glowering while Keith crawled all over the floor - at one point flinging himself towards his champagne glass and knocking it straight onto the beautiful rug. His movements were tremulous and loose, brimming with a childish glee; pink-faced and grinning he rolled about on the pile like some absurdly happy dog, and I couldn’t help but smile at him, the lovely little idiot. Pete rose and excused himself, having grown weary of Keith’s display.

“Come up here,” I said warmly, patting the cushion beside me. “Look at the mess you’ve made! You’ve spilled it all.”

Keith obeyed, shedding his sober black jacket onto the floor as he clambered into place. The night was hot and solid in our lungs, any hint of a cooling breeze throttled by a low, starless sheet of cloud. Keith was sweating heavily, the colour high across the sharp blades of his cheekbones. His fringe clung in inky little rivulets to his forehead. I bathed in his closeness, in the heat of his body, in the low animal smell of a long night full of exertion. Another drink, I announced. The chilled skin of the champagne bottle soothed me somewhat, briefly restoring my sanity. We drank deeply, not for want of alcohol but for the need of something cool and wet inside our throats. Keith gulped in a huge lungful of air and belched loudly. His tongue traced the thin brushstroke of his upper lip, sweeping away a lingering dew of champagne.

“Lovely,” I said, to no-one in particular.

How I longed for him. Small of frame, a contradiction of soft puppy-flesh and harsh masculine planes - his face was beautiful in its rare moments of thoughtful stillness, winning in its otherwise perpetual, wide-eyed animation. Ah yes, and his eyes - two bright pennies beneath drooping black lashes, never on you for more than a moment because they, too, were eternally restless - his rude little hands, his slender limbs, the glossy neatness of his dead-straight hair - their charm all served to chain me to him in silent devotion. Thankfully, I was not the only one. John quite obviously adored him. When not passing him the Swan Vestas he was otherwise steering him from total disaster with a covert and brotherly hand. How we loved Keith - our capricious friend, _son beau-frère_ , my dark-eyed little treasure.

Now alone, Keith and I talked tirelessly. I observed with increasing anxiety the way my watch-hands gnawed through the hours with alarming speed, robbing me of the bliss of Keith’s sole company. Four o’clock slipped past like sand through clumsy fingers. Tenuous sunlight touched the clouds from below, the smog-choked sky the texture of waxy honey. Keith had fidgeted out of his itchy shirt and trousers and had been sitting in his underwear for quite some time. He crowded me into one measly corner of the couch, sloppy-limbed and with his bony feet up on the cushions, toes tucked under my left thigh, staring at me insolently through the lean V of his open legs.

_This is how it begins._

Keith knew of my predilections. They all did, but the others never mentioned it outside of the odd clumsy blunt-tipped barb in conversation. I’d tried so very hard to tame them, too - Roger and John I did not bother with, but in Pete and Keith I sensed a longing for fine and beautiful things, a desire to be couched in gorgeousness. Pete took to it easily - his aquiline haughtiness married perfectly with high-class surroundings. Keith, however, was almost certainly a lost cause. I was confident that I could realign his tastebuds with Bolly and caviar, and I succeeded - but he would still embarrass me with his drippy sundaes, with his impudence and his slovenliness and his comic-books and the indelible thumbprint of his adolescence.

Keith’s toes wriggled under my leg. The side of his head hit the back of the chair with a muffled thud. His legs scissored open and closed, open and closed, his bare knees knocking together. I could see quite clearly that he was hard. Nonetheless I tried to ignore him, biding my time, afraid and hopeful all at once.

‘Kit,’ he said, in his high voice that went rough around the edges, frayed from years of being far too loud.

I opened my palm. As if by magic, I already had the downers in my sweating grasp. He popped one onto his tongue and rolled it around like candy before swallowing. His lips pinched, the line of his mouth elongating into a knowing smirk. _What's so amusing_ , I meant to ask, but I forget as soon as Keith's foot slipped out and over, coming to rest on top of my leg. The long toes flexed minutely, curving against the shape of me. My useless, trembling hands remained in my lap, but with my imagination I reached out boldly and smoothed my touch up across the bony shard of his ankle, over a slim calf, over awkward knees, between coarse-haired thighs - the flesh would be hot and sticky there, alive beneath my palm. _What then?_ I asked myself, filled with a species of anticipatory dread.

Keith, meanwhile, seemed to be enjoying my obvious discomfort. He folded his legs back under himself so that he could lean across me for the ice bucket, though it was less of a polite stretch and more of a calamity of naked limbs.

‘I’m thirsty,’ he tells me, our noses inches apart.

Here's how it would play out, ladies and gentlemen - welcome to the nighttime theatre, where one man sits alone in the stalls and observes the Bacchanalian revelry of his mind - observes it and abuses himself, forever the strange and lonely degenerate.

I’ll spare you the darkest details, but the bottle goes untouched - the ice slithers and clunks inside the metal bucket, bleeding away in that tremendous heat. I have him right there on that elegant couch, his sharp little nails digging into the back of my neck as Paris opens its eyes around us. Over the slope of his shoulder I see the grey tip of the tower thrusting upwards into the sky behind a tumbledown _appartement_ whose half-shuttered windows look directly into ours. The crescendo comes as the fat orange globe of the sun creeps into view, Keith wilting into my grateful arms. A moment passes before we peel ourselves apart, the unerotic reality of sexual aftermath deflating my spirits in the suddenly cheap-looking, too-bright room. Keith vanishes into my bedroom, no doubt crawling between my sheets and falling asleep within moments. I remain where I am, breathing deep and slow. Pete suddenly materialises, ever the early riser, staring at me in my ruined suit and with my trousers still hanging lewdly open - stares at me and shakes his head before moving off to relieve himself in a lavatory the size of a phonebooth.

But by now you must know, gentle reader, that there was never any syrupy slick-mouthed spread-legged tryst, no defilement of sumptuous rented upholstery - instead Keith simply reached over me, seized the neck of the bottle and upended it over his gaping gullet, only for a meager dribble to spatter his waiting tongue. Disgusted, he hurled it back into the ice and stood. ‘I’m going to bed,’ he declared loudly, then padded into the darkness of my bedroom. Only that little detail remained the same.

 I slept on the couch.


End file.
